Four Critical Points for Success

AMBASSADOR TAYLOR:  I did not prepare 15 minutes for the remarks, because I think it's more important to hear your questions and concerns about issues affecting you and your careers than it is for me to spend 15 minutes telling you about me and what I've done. I'm very proud of my career and the work I've been able to do, and I think the examples that I'm able to give you are probably more beneficial to you than hearing about my career.

But I will just give you four points that I think are critical to success—and it doesn't matter if it's success in business or success in money. The first one is to go where the action is. That’s a colloquial phrase, but essentially it means you have to take on challenges. No one ever gets ahead by sitting in the back of the room waiting for something to happen. You have to avail yourselves of opportunities to stretch yourself; to do more than you ever thought you could do.

I know when I left Washington in 1966 to go to the University of Notre Dame, between the first 18 years of my life, I had met ten white people in all of my life, living in Washington, DC. I left Washington, DC, and went to South Bend, Indiana, and learned that there was a different world. I could have been daunted by that. In fact, I almost got kicked out my first semester—not kicked out; I mean, I barely got a 2.0 in my first semester and was very disappointed or discouraged by all of it.

But I kept persevering. My point was I wanted to leave DC. I could have stayed here and perhaps gone to Howard. That was a great choice for other folks, but to me, I had to get out of DC. I had to go see where it was different. Because, one, my mother said (inaudible), and two, because I felt if I stayed here it was a mistake. People who don't go where the action is stagnate, and you're the best judge of how you can stretch.
       

The second point is, you have to prepare yourself. Preparation, regardless of what you're involved in, is an absolute key to success. And preparation in the academic sense can mean just reading every paper you can, or reading a web site, or a very good interview. But you never go into any new opportunity without understanding the circumstances you're going into. The only way you do that is to prepare yourself to study; to bring in as much information as you can gather about the institution, about its people, and about the leadership styles of those that you're going to work for.

I think what you will find is people are quite surprised by the preparation. In fact, they're so surprised that they're wondering, boy, this person really has something going.

The third point is setting high standards—standards for yourself individually, personally, and professionally, and also the standards by which you will expect others to work. We can make lots of excuses for why things don't get done. But most of the time, the excuse is because we didn't enforce high standards: high professional standards, high personal standards, and high standards of work ethic among your colleagues, and certainly for yourself.

Setting high standards are essential. The last ingredient is the one that my staff knows best, and that is you've got to work hard. I was down in Atlanta over the weekend, visiting my son who's at Morehouse and who continues to tell me “I don't like this professor; I don't like that professor; and I can't understand this; I can't understand that." I said "All that is uninteresting to you, because your job is to work hard.

He went out Saturday night and was up until 5:00 in the morning — the typical college weekend down there. I said "That's fine. You can party, but the bottom line is working hard." Hard work gets people ahead. Hard work gets recognized. People who don't work hard, don't achieve. There's always someone who's going to work harder than you to get to the ring that you're trying to get to.

Let me leave those four thoughts with you. I look forward to hearing your questions or comments about your careers and the challenges that you face, in hopes that I can give you some advice or at least the benefit of my perspective in terms of how I have moved forward.

MS. ST. CLAIRE: Thank you. Now we'll open the session up to questions. Mark?

PARTICIPANT: Good morning, everybody. I'm Mark Williams. I'm working out of the assistant secretary of criminal investigations’ office. One thing I've noticed since I have started here, and specifically working in my division, is that because I'm the youngest person there, that I'm always seen as, I guess, the child of the group. I try to work two steps ahead of everyone else . . .  

Being a contractor, it's hard for me to do the in-State opportunities, so I'm taking classes everywhere I can. It always seems that, no matter what I do, they're still saying "Oh, you know, he's young. What suggestions you have for me, I guess, being seen as more equal in the office, instead of the youngest person there?

AMBASSADOR TAYLOR: Be thankful that you are.

But what I hear you saying is not so much your youth. It's the fact that you don't feel that you're being recognized for your contribution, your ability to contribute despite your age. Is that right?

PARTICIPANT: Yeah.

AMBASSADOR TAYLOR: Then you need to find someplace else, because the job isn't challenging. You're saying that you're not challenged, or that people are not recognizing your ability to contribute. That's the time you need to move on. When you get stifled and feel people only (inaudible), it's time to move somewhere else. People don't often like people who are aggressive, who want to be more than what they think they are.

I tell this story when I talk to young folks, like you, or younger. It's you who defines you. You read about young African American males, and you read about guys who don't want to go to school, or this notion that studying hard is acting white. I ask the question "Who's defining who you are”?

There's only one person who can define who you are and that's you. If you allow others to define who you are, guess what? You can never be more than they expect you to be. Not what you can be, but what they want you to be, what they expect you to be. So, I'm not defined by anybody other than myself and who I want to be. If people don't give me the opportunity, I move on; because there will be somebody who will eventually recognize me for my worth and my value. It doesn't mean you leave your job today, but I'd look.

The other thing I talk about in terms of people defining who you are and why you have to define who you are is this: If you were to look at my career behind the scenes, I'm not supposed to be sitting here. A single parent, Southeast DC, Dunbar High School, no money, couldn't take a test. I mean, my SATs were right at a thousand. My Air Force qualifying tests were in the lower half. Every time I turned around, it was something that I wasn't supposed to be doing. They told me I couldn't go to Turkey and be successful because the Turks didn't like black folks. I went to Turkey, and I was quite successful in Turkey and continued my career. So, the point is, if you allow people to define who you are, you can never be more than what they want you to be; and what I want to be is the best of what I can be. Arguably, I am. At least I think so. In every endeavor I've been in, I've been known as the best. 
  

You noticed I'm an African American. If you're an African American, or you're a female, that's who you are. When I walk in a room, I'm black first, because that's what people see. And that's okay. But being black doesn't define how bad I am in terms of what I'm going to be able to do to this -- to the (inaudible) and a number of (inaudible) that define me. Gender is the same thing. There are sexists and racists out there who want to limit where people of color, or women, can go in their organization. If you let them do that, it's bad on you. I mean, the institution has ways of attacking that, but individuals also have a responsibility to speak out and not allow it to fester.

MS. ST. CLAIRE: Question?

PARTICIPANT:  You talked about preparation, and preparing yourself, and being a part of the entity. Can you describe one situation where your preparation was pivotal in changing your life, overseas or here domestically, in a situation where you pushed the envelope, and that situation was pivotal in changing your life, your career?

AMBASSADOR TAYLOR: You all can keep a secret, right?                   

PARTICIPANT: Bolt the doors.

AMBASSADOR TAYLOR: No. The Secretary asked me three times to come to Diplomatic Security and each time, I said "Sir, I'm very comfortable in Counterterrorism. The second time, I said "Sir, I've talked to Connie. I'm real comfortable doing what I'm doing. I'm not ready." The last time he talked to me, it's "Well, Frank, I need you." The worst thing you can tell a soldier is "I need you." I said, "Yes."

Well, it took about 3 months for me to be cleared or go through the employment process. In that 3 months, I read everything I could read about DS. I talked to hundreds of people in DS and out of DS to get a sense of what people thought about our organization. What its issues were, what its challenges were, and what we needed to fix. And I think I surprised everybody in the first staff meeting I went to, because I had more knowledge than anybody around the table of what the issues were.

That's the kind of preparation I'm talking about. There you can start your job from a standing start, not sitting and spending a month to figure out what's going on. You go into the job knowing what the issues are, and what you want to change, particularly in a position like mine. A lot of my military career has been the same way, where you go into a job, you're in a job two years, so you've really got a limited time to make a difference.

I think my colleagues at DS will say I've made a difference in the time that I've been here. And I'm continuing to make a difference from the day I arrived. Because time is short, and one has to demonstrate in that time that you can make a difference and make an organization better than it was when you took over.

When I was growing up, and as a young officer, I'd see a colonel, an O-6 who happened to be an African American. It didn't really matter. I took any opportunity I had to talk to a senior, "How did you do this? What are you all about? Where did you go?" I was always curious to know how somebody who did well got there. And so I shaped my whole thinking about what I needed to do to move forward. That, too, is a part of preparation. The point I was going to make earlier is this whole notion of mentoring. I think mentoring is a responsibility of leadership.

I can tell you, mentors may not look right. Mentors may not be only women, or only African American, or Hispanic American, or white Americans. The best leaders mentor all, because they are responsible for everyone who works for them. What I encourage you to do is to find someone you trust, because that's the best mentoring. Someone who looks like you may not be someone you can trust. Someone you trust is a person who has your best interests at heart.

Again, hopefully, it will be someone who looks like you, but it very well may not be. It may be the roughest, gruffest SOB in the office; someone to tell you that you're not wearing any clothes today.

PARTICIPANT: That you're not what?

AMBASSADOR TAYLOR: The king doesn't have any clothes, because that's what you need to know. My best mentors have been people who took me out behind the wood shed. I remember this chief master sergeant. He was from PG County; a young captain. He would take me and say "Captain, can I see you, sir?" He was always respectful. He'd go in, he'd close the circuit, and he'd come sit in my office; he'd sit there and he'd lecture me for an hour. He always ended up saying, "Sir, thank you for listening; get on and do your thing."

What he essentially told me was, "You're too rough, you're too gruff, you're too aggressive. You've got to slow it down a little bit. You'll get where you're going." Great advice. I didn't want to hear it because I thought I knew everything that I needed to know. But I listened. He was a great mentor. He was junior to me in grade, but not junior to me in experience, nor in his appreciation and care for who I was and who he thought I could be.

So as you select your mentors, it's like I told my kids: select your friends well and make sure that the friends you select really care about you. Mentors fall in the same category, because people who really care for you will tell you even what you don't want to hear. And a lot of times, in growing in your career, you're going to hear things that you don't want to hear.

There's another guy that I remember. He's on the ARB now. He was very senior to me in the Air Force. It was my first job. I did a lot of writing; a lot of analysis. Every paper had to go through this guy. It just used to drive me bats to get a paper back that was red all over. I mean, just red up and down. He actually scared me. I didn't want to see him, because he critiqued my papers so badly.

Now I could have taken this in one or two ways. One, he didn't like me and therefore he did it because he didn't like me; or I could take it that he was trying to help me improve my product. Well, I took it on as a challenge. I said I'm not going to let some son of a gun write red all over it. I improved my writing skills because they were atrocious. I thought they were good. They were not good. Today, I'm an excellent writer because—and I tell this guy the story and he gets red in the face—but because he challenged me to do better, almost embarrassing me. I got better because I recognized I needed to improve. Now, I could have said he doesn't like me, or what's wrong with this place? He was giving me a signal, and he never knew it. That's the other point that you need to take. People who give you feedback may not even understand the benefit that is being created for you. If you take it positively and try to change yourself to improve whatever that skill is.

MS. ST. CLAIRE: Thank you very much. Let's give them a hand.